I was part of the early alpha for this, they opened a beta wait list today. The thing that is different here is that they remove 99.9% of the friction to create agents, the target user group is not a user who can run Claude Code and install their app on some service, it is everyone else who couldn't be bothered to worry about plans, keys, domain names, datatabes, etc.
You talk to a master agent (Sidekick) describing the app you want, and it creates it for you, batteries included (a lot of tools, which are vetted MCP servers and skills, a database, cron-jobs, and a hosting environment where your apps live). The tools connect to many things such as email, slack, weather, sports, news, web, and your agents can do all sorts of things.
(disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but am not directly involved with Durable Functions)
Being a library is a pretty interesting feature! Correct, Durable Functions allows you to write task-parallel orchestrations of task-parallel 'activities' (which are stateless functions), and these orchestrations are fully persistent and resilient, like DBOS executions. It also has the concept of 'Entities', which are named objects (of a type you define) that "live forever", and serialize all method invocations, which are the only way to change their private state. These are also persistent. The Netherite paper [1], section 2, describes this model well.
So, there seems to be a pretty close correspondence between DBOS steps and DF activities, and between workflows and orchestrations. I don't know what the correspondence is to DF entities is in the DBOS model.
Peter, how does this compare to Azure Durable Functions? (Say, for the sake of argument, that you are comparing the Python version of both) Are there things that fundamentally you can do in one and not in the other?
You talk to a master agent (Sidekick) describing the app you want, and it creates it for you, batteries included (a lot of tools, which are vetted MCP servers and skills, a database, cron-jobs, and a hosting environment where your apps live). The tools connect to many things such as email, slack, weather, sports, news, web, and your agents can do all sorts of things.